Where is your Happy Dance?
A diminutive figure, squatting by the water’s edge. Beyond arms reach, and who is looking anyway?
Her face a study in rapt concentration, calculating possibilities and deciding if it’s worth it.
Plop.
Smile.
Plop, plop.
Giggle.
Plop, plop, plop.
A little happy dance in little brightly coloured wellies.
More plops.
And ripples…
Ripples spreading across the surface of the lake in the late afternoon sunlight as laughter echoes around the valley. The air joining in the fun.
And wonder…
Wonder that something so little could make such a splash!
‘I did this…’
Sheer joy.
I wonder, when did we lose our capacity for joy like this?
Did we forget where we put it and need to find it again?
If so, where do we look? Or more significantly, how do we look, because I am sure it’s not with world-weary eyes.
Perhaps along the way we have traded our wondrous big-ness for safe and scaled-down small-ness.
We don’t want to make ripples, in case we are shown up or told off.
Choosing the safety of comfort, we let our internal chatter rob us of joy. Or perhaps we’ve swallowed the individualism pill, and think it is all about us. It’s not. It’s always us and …
Us and the pond we are swimming in, the world around us.
Yet our culture has trained us to perceive ourselves to be separate. Not part of our natural environment, just travelling through.
It takes humility to let go of our human-centric lens, and yes, it’s hard at first. But then we realise the gift of seeing in colour when we had previously only viewed in monochrome.
And wonder starts to permeate our senses and we’re astonished by what we’ve missed in plain sight.
It’s like waking up to a new dawn, being glad to be alive.
Then there are the others, the people who shape our lives, and in turn whose lives we shape.
We think we finish at our skin’s edge, yet that’s merely one of many thresholds crossed in the act of being and becoming. Every day.
These ripples are the effect, and they spread far beyond us, in ways we will never see. And it’s not enough just be here, like independent observers, marking the rest out of ten.
We have the opportunity to enter in, to dance and take the risk that somebody might notice. And do it anyway.
Choosing to rediscover our joy and unlocking our wonder by becoming child-like in our curiosity.
Reencountering the world in a posture of play, rather than timidity.
Remembering what it is like to slosh around in brightly coloured wellies and lob pebbles into a pond.
Watching the ripples in wonder.
“We did this …”
And smile.
{P.S. Wellies are gumboots if you are outside of the UK}
